Ch.117The Walls of Sand

# Jericho Amael

“…It’s not your fault. That child… as someone with power, took responsibility.”

Yeo Un-jae apologized to me as I sat dazed in the dark incinerator corridor, having driven others away.

Hearing those words, I couldn’t contain the anger rising within me.

“Not my fault? Then whose fault is it supposed to be?”

Was the ghost girl wrong for choosing to save humans?

Was the human who rushed to protect his family despite being in panic at fault?

You call that wrong?

“The ghost girl did nothing wrong! If anyone’s at fault, it’s me and… you!”

If anyone was at fault, it was Yeo Un-jae for not catching the monster faster.

“Why didn’t you raise her to be more selfish?”

Yeo Un-jae didn’t even have time to raise the ghost girl.

“If only you hadn’t taught her that those with powers must sacrifice themselves…”

It was because Yeo Un-jae was that kind of person that I survived.

“If only you hadn’t prioritized protecting the weak!”

Thanks to growing up as such a person, I was saved.

I liked the ghost girl for being that way.

“Ugh, ah, aaah…!”

It’s not Yeo Un-jae’s fault.

The ghost girl died because I was too weak.

Too weak to protect even one person I cared about.

“AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

What angered me most was my own weakness.

And the incompetence that allowed the monster to grow.

Everything that caused the ghost girl’s death.

Everything that desecrated her memory.

“I’m sorry, Ho-young. I’m… I’m sorry.”

Why are heroes so inadequate?

Why do citizens exist who can’t even evacuate properly?

Why were monsters allowed to devour citizens until they evolved?

Why, why, why, why?

“Why haven’t you done anything until now…”

I eliminated those reasons one by one, just like eliminating monsters.

I created reasons for superhumans to become heroes rather than villains to increase their numbers.

I enforced civilian evacuation drills and created laws that wouldn’t hold anyone responsible for civilians who didn’t evacuate in time.

I developed tactics to never let monsters escape and prevented the government from treating heroes like tools.

But doing so caused those who became heroes for material rewards to muddy the purity of heroism like dirt mixed in water.

Heroes who abused the laws appeared.

Some government officials who lost heroes as personal guards began to show hostility.

Reality doesn’t unfold as one wishes.

The strong aren’t necessarily good, nor are the weak.

Both good and evil people can be strong or weak.

So I compromised.

Heroes with diminished purity became hands and feet that I directly controlled.

I made the law flexible, overlooking minor abuses while punishing only crimes that crossed the line.

I used Yeo Un-jae to block hostile government officials.

When I needed more power, I approached former enemies with a smile and became a politician like them.

I ignored problems I couldn’t solve immediately.

If necessary, I joined hands with villains and killed the innocent.

In reality, nothing can be changed without compromise.

It takes too long.

Things rot and crumble before they can be changed.

No matter how much you try to bail out this rotten muddy reality alone, you can’t get it all.

‘Professor Yeo.’

‘What is it?’

‘…How’s your body?’

‘How long has it been since the surgery, and you’re asking that now?’

‘Some has-been got critically injured by a mere villain, making things busy around here.’

‘Tsk… just eat something before you go.’

To bail out filth, you inevitably get filth on yourself.

‘Starlight.’

‘What is it? Need help with something?’

‘You can’t even handle your own work, what nonsense are you talking? Just do your job properly.’

‘Ugh…’

‘What the hell? Getting beaten by a B-rank villain because civilians were taken hostage? Thanks to your humiliation buying time, they were saved, but for an A-rank hero…’

‘Right, more important than a single civilian.’

‘Next time that happens, I’ll kill the hostage myself.’

‘What? Are you insane?’

I don’t want to accept this reality.

Heroes exist to fight monsters in the first place.

I was garbage who couldn’t even be a proper hero from the first step.

If I don’t do it.

Because I am the wall.

‘What… is this?’

A wall that couldn’t even protect what was within reach.

‘Where did this monster analysis data come from?!’

‘Paper? Looks like old documents. Nowadays everything is digitized.’

‘That doesn’t matter. Can you separately analyze the cellular structure of other monsters… no, of all monsters I capture from now on?’

I.

‘What are these monsters?’

Was always too late.

‘Was the data manipulated?’

‘Behind these monsters… something…’

I’ve compromised to make up for my inadequate abilities.

If there’s no time, I accept damage; if something must be eliminated, I accept sacrifice.

But if I don’t do at least this much, nothing can be stopped.

Without compromising anything, changing things is impossible unless you’re superhuman.

‘Ah~ seriously, I wish a perfect superhuman would appear and solve everything.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Hehe, a perfect superhuman who doesn’t use the bathroom, doesn’t smell, is handsome, tall, rich…’

‘Would this perfect superhuman eat spicy food without problems too?’

‘And organize their shoe rack perfectly.’

The perfect superhuman we jokingly talked about with the ghost girl.

I’m not such an impossible being.

‘Handling everything perfectly.’

Everything, a castle built on sand.

A hastily built, shoddy wall to block the waves.

‘No greed for wealth or power… never defeated, never dies.’

There’s too much you can’t do without wealth and power.

I’ve been defeated numerous times.

Though I’ve never died.

‘Protects the weak, ensures no one gets hurt, a superhuman among superhumans?’

I’ve already exploited countless weak people.

Created victims who suffered unjustly.

‘What do you want from such a superhuman anyway?’

‘Hmm… just a bit of peaceful time?’

Nevertheless, I kept moving forward.

To see what I desired with my own eyes.

‘Time for you, me, dad… family to go out together… that’s all.’

A reality just slightly better than now.

A little peace.

A world where strange things like heroes don’t need to fight.

The beach without monsters that the ghost girl wanted to visit.

The sea we reached together with the ghost girl in Yeo Un-jae’s car.

Building sand castles, eating watermelon together, laughing, talking, running along the beach.

‘Ho-young! What are you doing? Hurry up!’

In a memory that never existed, fulfilling the ghost girl’s unfulfilled wish, she called out to me.

I followed her and reached for her hand.

[Oh my, what’s this? Gu-gu, you can’t just eat anything you find.]

Her hand.

[Who’s this guy?]

[Huh? What’s this, haa? How did you find him in this mess?]

[Big sister told you?]

[Big sister? Which big sister?]

The brightly smiling face of the ghost girl, static, static, tearing memories.

[…You don’t know?]

[Don’t tell me it’s memories from humans you’ve eaten? You didn’t secretly eat some strange human, did you…?]

[Sa Gu-gu didn’t eat anything meow.]

The ghost girl’s hand wavers in double, triple layers, moving grotesquely.

[It was still breathing, wasn’t it? Hmm… then, rather than devouring it, this might be better.]

The ghost girl stabs a syringe she pulled from somewhere into my chest.

With a bright smile, the white waves of the sea turn pitch black, then bleach white, and disappear.

[The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?]

Her lips move differently from the voice I hear.

My superhuman senses read those lip movements.

‘Don’t come yet.’

#

“Mr. Cage!”

“Ugh, huff…”

Awakened from deep sleep by the loud voice, Jeong Ho-young blinked, aligning his blurry vision.

One of his two closest aides, who served as his secretary, was pressing firmly on his chest.

Breathing heavily under the pressure applied to stop the bleeding, Jeong Ho-young examined his internal condition.

“Are you conscious? Are you awake? Oh! Thank God! Thank you!”

The foreign sensation in his heart, the pain, the completely destroyed core of his ability.

Belatedly, the events before he collapsed flashed through Jeong Ho-young’s mind.

Yeo Un-jae’s hand piercing his chest, the momentarily amplified ability, followed by a non-human wavelength.

“Damn old man…”

Whatever happened, something ominous had occurred to Yeo Un-jae.

Breathing heavily, Jeong Ho-young called for his secretary as he felt vibrations from underground.

“What is… happening?”

“There’s no problem. Mr. Cage, you need to go to the treatment room immediately…!”

“Then what is… this sound?”

“Ugh…”

“Don’t make me… ask twice… Lee Ha-rin…”

Boom! Boom…! Continuous explosions echoing through the ground and sky, creating circular ripples of fog formed by the night air being torn apart.

At Jeong Ho-young’s urging, the woman called Lee Ha-rin moved her lips.

“After you collapsed, Starlight arrived. Six Despair-rank monsters appeared, and Black Cat defeated three of them. Really… you can rest now.”

“Did Yu Anna… ride that hero cannon? Kuk kuk, cough! Cough…!”

Even with his foggy mind, Jeong Ho-young understood how Yu Anna could have arrived in A City so quickly and burst into laughter.

It was amusing that he wasn’t the only one who had experienced that monstrous creation that no proper human would think to create or ride.

“The situation?”

“It’s being suppressed. Can you hear? Everyone is fighting the monsters.”

“Without me here, at least 3 out of 10 would be running away… they’re doing well suppressing those guys.”

“Starlight is doing well. Black Cat too…”

“That’s a lie.”

With his heart already burst, barely holding on with superhuman vitality, Jeong Ho-young was still an S-rank superhuman.

With such powerful wavelengths, he could tell who was fighting just by feeling it through his skin.

Those fighting now were Yu Anna and whatever Yeo Un-jae had become… and something strangely familiar nearby.

Besides them, two rampaging monsters.

“What is Black Cat doing?”

“Sh-she’s… sleeping.”

“Kuk, kuhehe… ah, I see…”

Sleeping in this situation—indeed, a monster is a monster, or rather, a cat is a cat.

Laughing at the absurdity, Jeong Ho-young realized something and smiled silently.

“There must be… a shortage of heroes…”

If Jeong Ho-young’s thoughts were correct, Black Cat wouldn’t wake up for a while.

Yu Anna, fighting the maddened Yeo Un-jae, wouldn’t have any leeway either.

Baskerville couldn’t hunt Despair-rank monsters.

Left like this, casualties among heroes and civilians would only increase.

“Lee Ha-rin.”

Having thought of a solution to this situation, Cage pointed with a trembling hand to a spot.

The memory of the moment when he struck, using Yeo Un-jae’s body as a shield.

Clearly, a white cylindrical object had fallen from his chest.

“N-no! You can’t!”

“Are you thinking of creating another one of you?”

Following Jeong Ho-young’s finger with her gaze, Lee Ha-rin pressed down on his body with a tearful face.

She wanted him to stay still, but her body froze at his next words.

“If I don’t move, civilians who don’t need to die will die…”

Pushed out of reality and feeling keenly that he wasn’t superhuman, Jeong Ho-young had hoped for a superhuman to appear among heroes.

Calling A City’s awakened ones “superhumans” rather than heroes was that hope.

But no superhuman appeared.

So he tried to become closer to one.

“That’s not… a necessary sacrifice.”

The lives of those who died.

To ensure the lives of those sacrificed weren’t wasted.

To make them necessary sacrifices.

To save even one more person from monsters.

“You’ll really die! If you do this!”

Though it’s somehow holding together now, his heart is already broken.

Even if he recovers, he can never return to being the Cage he once was.

“I’m already dead.”

“Uu, uuuugh…”

A City’s greatest superhuman, Cage, was already dead.

Cage took the hand of the tearful Lee Ha-rin who had placed her hand on his heart, and pointed in the same direction again.

“I’m grateful to you.”

The strange drug that presumably turned Yeo Un-jae into a monster.

Though its contents were suspicious, that pill had allowed Yeo Un-jae’s body, with its burst heart, to move like a superhuman several times.

Cage had long since stopped being picky about his methods.

Whether villain or monster, if it could be used, he would use it.

“Bring me… the medicine…”

He couldn’t let all the efforts of the human Jeong Ho-young be in vain.

Everything he had built to become the superhuman Cage.

This sand castle couldn’t be allowed to crumble yet.